In 1997, four years after Robert Benton’s Twilight, Curtis Hanson made the early-’50s period piece L.A. Confidential. The movie garnered a lot of praise: Oscars for its screenplay (adapted from James Ellroy’s novel of the same name) and Kim Basinger’s performance, and Best Picture nods from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review. (It got beaten out for the Academy Award by the juggernaut Titanic.)

A quarter-century on, the movie holds up pretty well, and one of the best things about is the way it depicts L.A. of the time as so wrapped up in the Dream Factory that it doesn’t know what’s real and what’s Hollywood fantasy. This is clear from the opening-credit sequence, narrated by the gossip-purveyor played by Danny DeVito (another of the best things about it).

Mild spoiler to follow. At the center of the plot, and Exhibit A in the fantasy-reality mixup, is an enterprise (apparently based on a real one) in which prostitutes are made up, or have had plastic surgery, to resemble movie stars. Basinger’s character is supposed to be Veronica Lake, and her john is apparently so into the deception that he insists on screening Lake movies at their assignations — here, the noir This Gun for Hire. Fans of Taxi Driver should pay attention to the first words out of Alan Ladd’s mouth.

It’s a delicious moment, but as L.A. Confidential goes on, the movie-in-movie moments get a bit obvious. Not once, but twice, cops bust open the door to scenes of degradation and violence to find a TV tuned to something anodyne (in one case the 1932 cartoon “Noah’s Outing,” in the other, Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall). And (another spoiler) when tormented cop Crowe and heart-of-gold hooker Basinger fall for each other, is it any surprise that their date movie is Roman Holiday? Yup, we get it: they want to escape to a world that’s less, well, noir.

Since this blog started, a small but active portion of it has been devoted to fake movies and TV shows seen in real ones — including the most recent post, on a Tony Randall-starring werewolf movie in an episode of Happy Days. (If you want to see a list of all such posts, go to the bottom of the sidebar at right and choose “Not Real” in the drop-down category menu.)

Anyone interested in this phenomenon has a new go-to site: Nestflix, put together by a web creator named Lynn Fisher, who does a lot of interesting projects, and also, clearly, has a lot of time on her hands. Nestflix is a very cool site, currently with more than 400 entries, including:

Loyal Movies in Other Movies readers will recall my posts on Habeus Corpus (in The Player) and Home for Purim (in For Your Consideration). But there’s obviously a whole lot here that I haven’t touched. When you click on one of the rectangles, you get a screen like this (the running time, logo, and credited director are completely fanciful):

Nestflix does such a great job that I will be giving fake movies a rest. At least for a while.

Previous posts have put forth some movie-in-movie firsts (list at the bottom of this post). Today we take a look at the first sound film (or the first I’ve found) to have such a scene. It’s William Wellman’s The Conquerors (1932), a multi-generational epic in which characters played by Richard Dix and Ann Harding go west in the 1870s and go through a remarkable amount of stuff in a mere 86 minutes.

In the scene in question, Harding goes to a picture show with her grandson, Roger (Wally Albright).

Several notable things about this sequence:

• It’s a sort of early master class in film editing, probably the work of Slavko Vorkapich, known as the master of montage. First we see young Roger paging through a magazine article about the Praxinoscope, an animation device invented in 1877 and considered a precursor to cinema proper. Then we see…
• Roger and his grandmother enter a movie house to see “Life Size Moving Pictures.” Inside, a title reads, “Ladies, Please Remove Your Hats”–which cannot help bringing to mind the first movie-in-movie movie, “Those Awful Hats.”
• The movie they watch is George Méliès’ early masterpiece of illusion, “Four Heads Are Better Than One.” It’s a bit anachronistic since the newsreels place the scene in late 1903 or early 1904 and “Four Heads” dates from 1898, but that’s okay.
• The transition at the end of the clip from the Wright brothers’ flight to the flipping calendars to planes filling the sky is interesting in the light of Wellman’s biography. Like Roger in the film, he was a fighter pilot in World War I, and he went on the make numerous aviation-themed movies, notably Wings, which won the first Academy Award for Best Picture in 1927.

So here are the firsts we have so far (all subject to change, of course):

First movie-in-movie: Those Awful Hats (1909).

First real movie-in-movie: Show People (1928).

First movie-in-sound-movie: The Conquerers (1932).

First sound-movie-in-movie: Sabotage (1936).

First non-animated-sound-movie-in-movie (fake): Saboteur (1942).

First non-animated-movie-in-sound-movie (real): White Heat (1949).

[For part I of this post, click here; for part II, click here.]

The final movie-in-movie scene in A Star Is Born is a doozy, naturally. Norman and Vicki Maine (James Mason and Judy Garland) are throwing a party. Hollywood being Hollywood, Vicki circulates among the guests, asking, “Would you like to see a movie? We’re going to run one.” Lights go down, curtains automatically close, a screen rises from the floor and a modern painting retracts to reveal a projector. A (fake) newsreel begins.

Presently, studio chief Oliver Niles (Charles Bickford) sidles away to another room, turns on a television set, and fiddles with the remote, just as Norman walks in on him. What appears to be a ballroom scene of an antebellum costume drama is on.

I wish I knew what the movie is — it’s not listed in IMDB connections or in filmsinfilms, or mentioned anywhere else I can find. It looks like Gone with the Wind, and I hope it is, because that would make the most monumental and cosmic in-joke in the history of movies. Why? Because George Cukor, director of A Star Is Born, was supposed to helm GWTW but was fired by producer David O. Selznick.

Things get amazinger. Oliver switches to a boxing match but through a window we get glimpses of the movie the rest of the guests are watching. That makes two movies-in-movie in one scene, which is a record (except I guess for shots of multiple TVs in appliance-store windows in films like Diner and The Shape of Water).

Again, I can’t tell what the movie is. It appears to be some sort of jungle epic, and judging by the credits, I believe it’s fake. And by the way, the credit in the shot above is another great in-joke. The “star” appears to be “Roy Webb.” There is no such star or actor by that name. However, Roy Webb was a contemporary Hollywood composer of the first rank, having scored such films as Notorious and Out of the Past.

A couple of other notes on A Star is Born. First, it counts as a “double-dip”: Charge at Feather River is seen in A Star Is Born, and Star is Born seen in three different movies — Twister, Hearts in Atlantis, and P.S. I Love You. And Twister, as previously noted, is the end of another chain — Now, Voyager; Summer of ’42; and The Shining.

All eight of the movies mentioned in the previous paragraph were from the Warner Brothers studio — an indication of directors economizing by going in-house when it comes to their movie-in-movie choices. It’s a tendency that I’ve just started to notice and really should quantify. Watch out for a future post.

 

[You can read Part I here.]

Fast forward. Vicki Lester (Judy Garland) has gotten her big break, a starring role in a movie musical. She and husband Norman Maine (James Mason) go to the sneak preview, watching avidly from the balcony.

 

The film doesn’t cut away from this (unnamed, I believe) movie-within-a-movie — the so-called “Born in a Trunk” sequence. Hardly. It stays there for no less than fifteen minutes. The sequence was actually added after director George Cukor had finished his work on A Star Is Born and left the country to scout locations for his next picture. In Cukor’s rough cut, Norman and Vicki are seen going into the theater and then emerging at the end of the preview to wild cheers, a star having been born.  Studio chief Jack Warner decided proof of Vicki’s talent was needed, and hired longtime Garland collaborator and friend Roger Edens to supply it.

If there is a more meta moment in a major American film, I don’t know what it is. Beyond its being a film within a film, the sequence is a version of Vicki’s star-is-born story, but also, more pointedly, a retelling of Garland’s own saga. As Trey Taylor has written, it

is special not only because it was a near-faithful reproduction of [Garland’s] own tumultuous journey to stardom – a classic retelling of the E! True Hollywood Story as narrated and sung by the protagonist herself – but also because it was her onscreen comeback. Who else has made a film about a star who makes a comeback and, as a premonitory result, has a comeback? What better example of art-imitating-life is there?

In the film-within-a-film, Vicki Lester’s character accepts the audience’s cheers and flowers for her show-stopping and -ending performance of “Swanee” (one of a half-dozen vintage tunes in the sequence), and sits on the edge of the stage, surrounded by “garlands” of roses.

She addresses the audience, speaking rather than singing (the words are by Leonard Gershe, later the Broadway playwright of Butterflies Are Free):

Thank you, thank you very much
I can’t express it any other way
For with this awful trembling in my heart
I just can’t find another thing to say
I’m happy that you liked the show
I’m grateful you liked me
And I’m sure to you the tribute seemed quite right.
But if you knew of all the years
Of hopes and dreams and tears
You’d know it didn’t happen overnight
Huh, overnight!

And I don’t know if it strikes anyone else this way, but it reminds me of nothing other than the rhyming Munchkins in Garland’s The Wizard of Oz of fifteen years earlier:

We thank you very sweetly
For doing it so neatly
You’ve killed her so completely
That we thank you very sweetly

Anyway, at this point she starts to sing (melody by Edens),

I was born in a trunk
In the Princess Theatre in Pocatella, Idaho
It was during the matinee on Friday
And they used a makeup towel for my didee
When I first saw the light
It was pink and amber
Coming from the footlights on the stage
When my dad carried me out there to say hello
They told me that I stopped the show.

And here art is imitating life imitating art, or some such. The story she sings isn’t so much that of Vicki Lester (born Esther Blodgett) as that of Judy Garland — born Frances Ethel Gumm in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, in 1922 and nicknamed “Baby.” According to Garland biographer  John Fricke

Her father managed the town movie theatre; her mother accompanied silent films on the piano. Both parents performed, as did Baby’s two older sisters, and she joined the family act on December 26, 1924, in a song-and-dance routine with her sisters and her own solo, a scheduled one-chorus arrangement of “Jingle Bells.” To the delight of the audience, Baby refused to leave the stage and went into reprise after reprise of the latter number; her grandmother finally had to walk on from the wings and carry the child offstage as she protested, “I wanna sing some more!”

Vicki’s character continues to tell her story, and then …

 

The filmed flashback nearly, but not quite, qualifies this as a movie-in-a-movie-in-a-movie, a triple-header seen before only in Scream 4 and New York, New York. And the latter offers one more meta angle on A Star Is Born. Far more than I realized when I wrote the post on Martin Scorsese’s 1977 musical, the “Happy Endings” sequence in New York, New York, starring Garland’s daughter, Liza Minelli — at 31, she was one year younger than her mother in Star Is Born — is an homage, reworking, imitation, call it what you will, of “Born in a Trunk,” a movie-in-a-movie (twelve minutes long instead of fifteen) showing the rise to stardom of the character her character plays.

And if you want spooky, I’ll give you spooky. Quick, who is this a photo of?

If you said Garland in “Born in a Trunk,” you’d be right. But if you said Minelli, it would be completely understandable, and just one more example of the reverberations — past, future, and inward — of A Star Is Born.

Next (and last): A Star Is Born goes even mo’ meta.